Political Season Opens With Focus on Security

President Bush spoke to the Military Officers Association of America in Washington on Tuesday.Credit
David Scull for The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 — The fall campaign season opened today with President Bush and Democrats each trying to seize the high ground on national security, as the White House released an updated version of its anti-terrorism strategy and the Democrats countered with list of the administration’s shortcomings on the issue.

The White House report, titled “National Strategy for Combating Terrorism,’’ was drafted in 2003 and updated in March. The new version confirmed the growth of decentralized networks of extremists, which have supplanted Al Qaeda as the greatest terrorism threat, and singled out Iran as a potential source of unconventional weapons for terrorist groups.

“America is safer, but not yet safe,’’ the report said.

President Bush said this afternoon that Al Qaeda terrorists view Americans as a decadent, Vietnam-haunted people who lack the backbone and stomach for a long conflict . “And they’re wrong,” Mr. Bush said in a speech here to the Military Officers Association of America. The president’s address was one of a series he is giving to mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks as he and his Republican allies battle Democrats on terrorism-related issues.

Mr. Bush said Al Qaeda terrorists now consider Iraq “the central front” of a war that they hope will end in a “caliphate” governed by the dictates of “violent Islamic radicalism” across the entire Middle East. Destroying the new democratic Iraq is essential to their evil aspirations, he said.

“It is foolish to think you can negotiate with them,” Mr. Bush said. No one in either major party has suggested negotiating with terrorists, although many Democrats and some Republicans have criticized the conduct of the war in Iraq. Some critics have called for a phased withdrawal of American troops from the country.

Mr. Bush has long argued that Iraq has become the “central front’’ of the war on terror and that one benefit of the war there has been to draw extremists together in one place where they can be fought far from American shores. But the strategies discussed in the report generally apply less to Iraq than to the new breed of small terror groups springing up around the world, and the report acknowledged that “the ongoing fight for freedom in Iraq has been twisted by terrorist propaganda as a rallying cry.’’

Mr. Bush again alluded to Iran, whose people share with some Iraqis an enmity toward the United States, even though Iran and Iraq fought a bloody war some two decades ago. The United States and its allies, he said, “will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon.”

Last week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney both used forms of the verb “appease” in referring to critics of the Iraq war, prompting complaints from Democrats that they were cynically invoking images of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s attempt to satisfy Hitler’s ambitions at a 1938 meeting at Munich.

The president did not go that far today. But he did liken the battle against Osama bin Laden and his followers to earlier struggles against the aspirations of Lenin and those of Hitler, “a failed Austrian painter.”

“The question is, will we listen?” Mr. Bush said. “Will we pay attention to what these evil men say?”

If free peoples do not heed the call of history, Mr. Bush said, “Fifty years from now, history will look back on our time with unforgiving clarity.”

The president’s focus on Iran, and to a lesser extent Syria, as backers of terrorist groups, comes as the administration is seeking to pressure them to reduce their support for Hezbollah in Lebanon.

In the case of Iran, which the report singles out as “the most active state sponsor of terrorism,’’ Mr. Bush is also currently seeking to win agreement at the United Nations Security Council for sanctions to punish Iran for refusing the council’s request that it halt nuclear enrichment.

“Most troubling is the potential WMD-terrorism nexus that emanates from Tehran,’’ the report said.

The possibility that Saddam Hussein might develop “weapons of mass destruction” and pass them to terrorists was the prime reason Mr. Bush gave in 2003 for ordering the invasion of Iraq.

In the report, the White House cited progress on a number of fronts, saying “We have done much to degrade Al Qaeda and its affiliates and to undercut the perceived legitimacy of terrorism.’’ The report also said that counterterrorism measures have been expanded at home and abroad.

A group of top Democrats held a press conference today before Mr. Bush’s speech to release a report that they said showed the president’s approach to terrorism to be a failure. The report was compiled by the Third Way National Security Project, a nonprofit advocacy group that describes itself as progressive.

“Under the Bush administration and this Republican Congress, America is less safe, facing greater threats, and unprepared for the dangerous world in which we live,’’ said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader in the Senate. “This new report is a stunning indictment of Bush foreign policy, and it makes a clear case for the new direction we need to keep America safe.”

Sharon Burke, the project’s director, said that the study showed that the number of al Qaeda members had grown from about 20,000 in 2001 to about 50,000 today, and that terrorist attacks worldwide were up sharply. The number and power of insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan are also on the rise, she said, while the strength and readiness of the American military have been drained by the war in Iraq.

“The numbers show that the president’s strategy is not working,’’ she said.

The one point on which both reports agreed is the growth of small terrorist cells that operate outside of centralized organizations like al Qaeda.

“Our effective counterterrorist efforts, in part, have forced the terrorists to evolve and modify their ways of doing business,’’ the White House report said. “Today, the principal terrorist enemy confronting the United States is a transnational movement of extremist organizations, networks and individuals.’’

In recent speeches, Mr. Bush has taken to calling the enemy “Islamo-fascists.’’ Today’s report said that what united the movement was “a common goal of ushering in totalitarian rule,’’ but did not use the president’s term, saying instead that the terrorists were exploiting Islam.

Also absent from the report was any mention of Osama bin Laden. Instead, it recounted among the administration’s successes that “most of those in the Al Qaeda network responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, including the plot’s mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, have been captured or killed.’’

At a briefing about the report, the White House homeland security adviser, Fran Townsend, said that “bin Laden remains the number-one target, but he’s not the only target.’’

“The greatest threat to us is this ideology of violent extremism, and its greatest public proponent is Osama bin Laden,’’ Ms. Townsend said.

Ms. Townsend said that “the long-term antidote to terrorism is freedom and democracy.’’

In the short term, she said, the administration has been looking for ways to attack terrorist groups by going after their vulnerable points: their need for leadership, recruits, money, communications and weapons.

But the report gives relatively few specifics concerning what it calls the most urgent problem, that of denying terrorists access to unconventional weapons and fissile material in particular. While it talks about the need to block rogue states from supplying such materials, there is no discussion of the nuclear networks, like the one formerly run by Pakistan’s top nuclear scientist, A. Q. Khan, that have been the main source for the spread of nuclear weapons technology.

The report also notes the “increasingly sophisticated use of the Internet and the media’’ that has allowed terrorists to recruit and communicate.

David Sanger reported from Washington for this article and John O’Neil from New York. David Stout contributed reporting from Washington.